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Converting a Vanilla

Like many kinky people, I was trapped in a vanilla marriage for a very long time. Unlike many kinky people, I actually did manage to “convert” my (now ex-) husband after more than a decade of attempts. I don’t recommend taking that path. It was a lot of work, and it caused a lot of pain for me along the way.

So how did I do it? How do you convert a vanilla? My experience is that it is an arduous process. Think about a snail running a marathon or even a 100m race for that matter. There’s no way to make it faster. The conversion just took time and persistence. That’s not to say that I was bugging my ex every single day for kinky sex. Sometimes we would go years before I would bring kink up again because he had shot me down so thoroughly the last time I tried.

However, my general approach was to figure out which kink he was most likely to be attracted to. My primary kink is usually spanking (except with this hormonal crap of late…). However, spanking was a total turn off for him. He had no interest. He didn’t want to hurt me. He didn’t see the appeal. He wasn’t going to do something that “weird.”

On the other hand, this same guy loved tying knots. He had learned from his dad when sailing, so any time he got his hand on a piece of twine or rope, he’d fiddle with it, tying knots. To me, it didn’t seem like a huge jump from tying knots in rope for fun to tying up a woman using rope and knots. However, his brain couldn’t make that connection. So slowly I worked him up to it. I bought the rope and showed it to him, but it stayed in the closet because he didn’t want to use it. When I was under the influence of various legal substances and more relaxed than usual, I would get brave enough talk to him about my fantasies involving rope in bed. Then, one day, suddenly it clicked. He figured out that he liked tying knots in rope, and bondage was just tying knots in rope with a naked woman involved. I brought out the rope, and finally, after so many years of prepping, he was ready to begin exploring this kink with me on rare occasions.

Honestly, it took a sex therapist getting involved before I could get him to do anything else kinky with me. He was resistant to so many sexual acts outside of missionary position penis-in-vagina sex. Our therapist began putting pressure on him to actually try some kink as a way of improving our relationship—such a radical concept which I had been trying to get through to him for years! However, my ex was able to hear it from the male sex therapist in a way that he couldn’t hear me. I think having another man telling him that it was ok to do these things gave him psychological permission to try things he felt were taboo. In the last year of our marriage, the sex became the best it had ever been for me because there was finally kink involved. It wasn’t enough to salvage the very damaged relationship, but it was enough to make my life a little happier.

As we were divorcing, we had a few brutal final fights. One of my ex’s parting comments to me was that it was all my fault that he wasn’t going to be able to just date “normal” women now. He wasn’t going to be happy unless he was in a kinky relationship because he had learned to love bondage that much by the end. Of course, I had absolutely no sympathy for his “problem” of needing to find bondage bunnies in the future. I didn’t actually convert him. All I really did was help him become aware of what was already inside of him. What I did was help break down the barriers he had put up to kinky sex, and now he was being forced to deal with his own true sexual desires.